7 ms·

Claude Managed Agents

169 points by adocomplete 6mo ago

lifecodes 6mo ago
MANAGED AGENTS sounds like progress, but also like we’re standardizing around the current limitations instead of solving them.
datadrivenangel 6mo ago
And now OpenClaw is dead because serious people have a less janky option!
lambdanodecore 6mo ago
The next $100B buisness model in 2026 is AaaS (Agent as a Service).
- dennisy 6mo ago
  Let’s just shorten it to AaS?
  - woah 6mo ago
    agentic software services
  - marknutter 6mo ago
    Agent Solution Services
bnchrch 6mo ago
Happy to see this launched, particularly today. I own a stake in a small brewery in Canada, and this feature just saved me setting up some infrastructure to "productionize" an agent we created to assist with ordering, invoicing, and government document creation. I get paid in beer and vibes for projects like these, so the more I can ship these projects in the same place I prototype them the better. (Also don't worry all, still have SF income to buy food for my family with)
- SpaceManNabs 6mo ago
  i get paid in vibes and chilling as well for some similar agent stuff i do for content creators. quick question, how do you manage these side projects that kinda need to be production ready but aren't you are actual SF job lol? some of these people think they are my actual customer/client but like i do it for fun and to help them out.
  - emvideo 6mo ago
    As a video content creator, I'm curious if you would mind sharing the agentic stuff you're doing for others?
    - SpaceManNabs 6mo ago
      not necessarly agentic i use comfyui to generate cartoons for some comedians i also have an n8n pipeline (there is an agent here) that mines social media for certain topics and audio i also use gemini to transcribe audio from sets and to generate scripts i am working on a clipmaker because I find opus pro and others to leave out context and audience reactions too often.. i will just upscale in topaz anyways.
      - emvideo 5mo ago
        I've used Opus a few times and always found it lacking as well. I'd be interested in a clip maker that doesn't miss context.
ziml77 6mo ago
Those agents did such a wonderful job making and deploying this page that the testimonials are unreadable because each spot has two of them overlapping.
- Revisional_Sin 6mo ago
  I just have a black page.
- adrian_b 6mo ago
  That is also true for me with Firefox on Linux. However, Vivaldi on Linux renders it correctly, so I assume that it probably works right only in Chrome and completely compatible browsers. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of Web sites that work right in a single browser, usually Chrome, so I always must keep around at least 2 or 3 different browsers.
llmslave 6mo ago
This is going to grow into a sophisticated platform, and is what will eventually compete head on with saas. I dont think companies will build their own agents, aside from looping in tools. As the models improve, there will be less hand holding. This could end up competing with AWS/GCP
- siva7 6mo ago
  What exactly makes you think that AWS & co. don't have already two competing Agents-as-a-Service Platforms at any time?
  - llmslave 6mo ago
    Anthropic is very far ahead on agentic engineering. There is more to getting it to work than it looks, and their models might be directly trained to know how to use the claude code harness. But beyond that, AWS is a very complex platform. Agents simplify saas, the agent itself manages the api calls, maybe the database queries, more of the logic. As software moves into the agent, you need less cloud capability, and a better agent harness/hosting. Essentially, this makes the AWS platform obsolete, most services make much less sense.
- lurker919 6mo ago
  Exactly my thoughts, AWS is due for a large rewrite/ground up rewrite from first principles to be able to fully utilize LLMs/agentic capabilities.
  - llmslave 6mo ago
    yeah, alot of the services dont make as much sense
- mrbungie 6mo ago
  They need to offer more 9s of availability before this happens though.
JLO64 6mo ago
As someone who spins up docker containers where I use the Anthropic Agentic SDK to build Jekyll websites for customers, I don’t see much of an appeal. I didn’t find it that difficult to set up the infrastructure, the hard part was getting the agents to do exactly what I wanted. Besides, eventually I might want to transition away to another provider (or even self hosting) so I’d prefer having that freedom.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
codinhood 6mo ago
I wonder how long until Claude/OpenAI eat a lot of the current AI/Agent SaaS's lunch. Originally I thought they would stick towards being a model provider mainly, but with all the recent releases it seems they do want to provide more "services." Wonder what part of the market 3rd party apps will build a moat around?
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- ergocoder 6mo ago
  Probably never. There are a couple reasons: 1. We pay for saas, so we don't have to manage it. If you vibe-code or use these AI things, then you are managing it yourself. 2. Most Saas is like $20-$100/month/person for most Saas. For a software engineer, that maybe <1h of pay. 3. Most Saas require some sort of human in the loop to check for quality (at least sampling). No users would want to do that. Number 2 is the biggest reason. It's $20 a month.... I'm not gonna replace that with anything. Writing this message already costs more than $20 of my time. I predict that the market will get bigger because people are more prone to automate the long-tail/last-mile stuff since they are able to
  - codinhood 6mo ago
    Interesting, so you're saying Anthropic/Openai/etc will get a general solution that won't be hands off. The moat for other companies will be creating the specific, managed solution. I can see that, assuming models don't make some giant leap forward.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - azmz 6mo ago
      [flagged]
  - spiderfarmer 6mo ago
    Your vision on the market for this is skewed by the fact that you're probably overpaid.
aivillage_team 6mo ago
[dead]
cedws 6mo ago
I saw this coming. Anthropic wants to shift developers on to their platform where they’re in control. The fight for harness control has been terribly inconvenient for them. To score a big IPO they need to be a platform, not just a token pipeline. Everything they’re doing signals they’re moving in this direction.
- spwa4 6mo ago
  Well, that sucks. Replacing the harness with something task-specific has proven very powerful in my usecases. But you should correct: Claude is very happy to let you use whatever you want for a harness ... as long as you're on a pay-as-you-go plan. So it's not blocked. It's just not allowed on the $20 per month plan. First, harnesses can give access to company internal tools (like the ticket queue). You could do this with MCP, but it's much harder, slower and it kind of resists doing this (if you want a bot to solve a ticket, why not start with an entire overview of the ticket in the first request to your model? This can't easily be done with MCP) Second harnesses can direct the whole process. A trivial example is that you can improve performance in a very simple way: ask "are you sure?" showing the model what it intends to do, BEFORE doing it. Improves performance by 10%, right there. Give a model the chance to look at what it's doing and change it's mind before committing. Then ask a human the same question, with a nice yes/no button. Try that with MCP. Of course you quickly find a million places to change the process and then you can go and meta-change the process. Like asking an AI what steps should be followed first, then do those steps, most of whom are AI invocations with parts of the tickets (say examine the customer database, extract what's relevant to this problem, ...). Limiting context is very powerful, and not just because it gets you cheaper requests. Get an AI to make relevant context for a particular step before actually doing that step ...
  - gck1 6mo ago
    > A trivial example is that you can improve performance in a very simple way: ask "are you sure?" showing the model what it intends to do, BEFORE doing it. Improves performance by 10% Put it into the "are you sure" loop and you'll see the model will just keep oscillating for eternity. If you ask the model to question the output, it will take it as an instruction that it must, even if the output is correct.
aoliveira 6mo ago
They keep calling this the first solution of this kind...obviously Anthropic is a much larger company, but https://smith.langchain.com/ https://smith.langchain.com/ has this...and had for a while, or am I missing something?
dangoodmanUT 6mo ago
This was inevitable, I called this a few weeks ago [1]. It’s an easy way to increase revenue without making the models smarter, and lock you in harder https://danthegoodman.substack.com/p/where-agents-converge https://danthegoodman.substack.com/p/where-agents-converge
0o_MrPatrick_o0 6mo ago
I’ve been building my own version of this. It’s a bit shocking to see parallel ideation. FWIW- IMO, being locked into a single model provider is a deal breaker. This solution will distract a lot of folks and doom-lock them into Anthropic. That’ll probably be fine for small offices, but it is suicidal to get hooked into Anthropic’s way of doing things for anything complex. IME, you want to be able to compare different models and you end up managing them to your style. It’s a bit like cooking- where you may have greater affinity for certain flavors. You make selection tradeoffs on when to use a frontier model on design & planning vs something self hosted for simpler operations tasks.
- TIPSIO 6mo ago
  FWIW everyone is also building a version of this themselves. Only so many directions to go
  - rtuin 6mo ago
    Most definitely. Although I haven’t found an (F)OSS project that lets one easily ship [favorite harness SDK] to self-hosted platform yet. Which projects are standing out in this space right now?
    - jawiggins 6mo ago
      Shameless self promo but, I've been working on Optio specifically for coding, it works by taking any harness you want and tasking it to open Github/lab PRs based on notion/jira/linear tickets, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520220 It works on top of k8s, so you can deploy and run in your own compute cluster. Right now it's focused only on coding tasks but I'm currently working on abstractions so you can similarly orchestrate large runs of any agentic workflow.
      - Jayakumark 6mo ago
        @jawiggins saw your repo it looks like openAI symphony but better as it works across multiple agents and issue trackers and the feedback loop is great . One feature request though - can you add plan mode ? Your issues are so detailed it becomes plan to implement (but I guess your plan mode is currently happening outside of GitHub issues ) but let’s say issue is “implement support for plan mode” there should be back and forth with agent with issue tags pointing to opus max and/or plan mode - so we can correct agents plan back and forth and once tag is removed it can start implementing or something similar ?
siva7 6mo ago
> With Managed Agents, you define outcomes and success criteria, and Claude self-evaluates and iterates until it gets there (available in research preview, request access here). It also supports traditional prompt-and-response workflows when you want tighter control. Call me stupid, but this sounds not like they want software developers to be around in a year or two.
- baal80spam 6mo ago
  But that's exactly what Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) wants.
Sol- 6mo ago
In addition to the managed interface for agent configuration and so on, is the novelty that all the agents run on Anthropic's infra? Sort of like Claude Code on the Web? If so, interesting that they move up the stack, from just a provider of an intelligence API to more complex deployed products.
jameslk 6mo ago
We're in the early days of agentic frameworks, like the pre-PHP web. CGI scripts and webmasters. Eventually the state-of-the-art will slow down and we'll eventually have something elegant like Rails come out. Until then, every agent framework is completely reinvented every week due to new patterns and new models. evals, ReACT, DSPy, RLM, memory patterns, claws, dynamic context, sandbox strategies. It seems like locking in to a framework is a losing proposition for anyone trying to stay competitive. See also: LangChain trying to be the Next.js/Vercel of agents but everyone recommending building your own. That said, Anthropic pulls a lot of weight owning the models themselves and probably an easier-to-use solution will get some adoption from those who are better served by going from nothing to something agentic, despite lock-in and the constant churn of model tech
- dmix 6mo ago
  Completely agree re: AI chatbot/RAG being just like the pre-PHP web world. There's a hundred half baked solutions floating on blogs and github but not a coherent dominant framework that puts it all together properly. Langchain is close but still feels a bit abstract and DIY. That plus everyone is using 5 different vector DBs and reranking models from different vendors than the answer models etc.
- gck1 6mo ago
  I believe framework is simply never, ever going to work for LLM-based agentic workflows. Framework is simply way too rigid for a non-deterministic technology. We may see libraries that provide tools for managing agents, but then again, there's nothing that tmux can't do already.
  - harlequinetcie 6mo ago
    I'm a bit at odds with this. I agree a framework is something that sounds outdated. I also believe an orchestrator is needed. Something that abstracts you from a specific provider. Like hardware, drivers and operating systems. Right now, my thoughts are on that line: Who will build that operating system? Who will have it in the cloud? It needs to be robust to operate for large organizations, open source, and sit on top of any provider. Right now we are seeing BSD vs GNU/Linux vs DOS kind of battles.
patrickkidger 6mo ago
I'm not sure if I'm about to be the old man yelling at clouds, but Anthropic seem to be 'AWS-ifying'. An increasing suite of products which (at least to me) seem to undifferentiated amongst themselves, and all drawn from the same roulette wheel of words. We've got Claude Managed Agents, Claude Agent SDK, Claude API, Claude Code, Claude Platform, Claude Cowork, Claude Enterprise, and plain old 'Claude'. And honourable mention to Claude Haiku/Sonnet/Opus 4.{whatever} as yet another thing with the same prefix. I feel like it's about once a week I see a new announcement here on HN about some new agentic Claude whatever-it-is. I have pretty much retreated in the face of this to 'just the API + `pi` + Claude Opus 4.{most recent minor release}', as a surface area I can understand.
esaym 6mo ago
The website is solid black on Firefox mobile for android. Maybe they should get an agent on that.
- jorl17 6mo ago
  Anthropic's website is always completely broken for me on Zen (a firefox derivative). I used to think it was an extension, but even without extensions it often just shows blank pages.
  - raggi 6mo ago
    Same for me in firefox and chrome. I'm sure it's one of the DNS block lists I have and some really crappy marketing tracking code. Edit: confirmed, loads with a public DNS provider that has no blocklists.
- ed_mercer 6mo ago
  Works fine here, also on Firefox mobile (149.0.1) on Android 16.
tailsdog 6mo ago
Looks great, I can't wait to use it. I imagine it could become very expensive for certain workflows, it will probably be like AWS where if you're not careful with the setup and watching what you're doing it will spin up 1000s of agents and rack up huge bills! It's going to be a massive money spinner!
rick1290 6mo ago
Not quite sold on this. I'm going to stick with pydantic ai and dbos/temporal/celery. I do not want to be vendor locked into one of these players. I want to work with absoluately any llm I want... I think we need to keep pushing for best in class open source orchestrtion and not get sucked into this platforms.
mdrachuk 6mo ago
It’s all good until your production agents deployment has a single 9 uptime. I use Claude Code as my main coding harness daily but making customers reliant on Anthropic software is a big no-no. Quality engineering is just not their thing.
mccoyb 6mo ago
I'm suspicious that this is going to lead to optimal orchestration ... or rather, that open source won't produce a far better alternative in time. The best performance I've gotten is by mixing agents from different companies. Unless there is a "winner take all" agent (I seriously doubt it, based on the dynamics and cost of collecting high quality RL data), I think the best orchestration systems are going to involve mixing agents. Here, it's not about the planner, it's about the workers. Some agents are just better at certain things than others. For instance, Opus 4.6 on max does not hold a candle to GPT 5.4 xhigh in terms of bug finding. It's just not even a comparison, iykyk. Almost analogous to how diversity of thought can improve the robustness of the outcomes in real world teams. The same thing seems to be true in mixture-of-agent-distributions space.
- intothemild 6mo ago
  Yeah this has been my experience too, mixing agents/models from different companies.. Having Opus write a spec, then send to Gemini to revise, back to Opus to fix, then to me to read and approve.. Send to a local model like Qwen3.5 to build, then off to Opus to review ... This was such an amazing flow, until Anthropic decided to change their minds.
  - lbreakjai 6mo ago
    This is still very much doable. This is exactly how I'm working. I'm using opencode with a mixture-of-agents I built (https://github.com/tessellate-digital/notion-agent-hive https://github.com/tessellate-digital/notion-agent-hive), where the model behind each agent is configurable.
  - gck1 6mo ago
    You can still do all of this. With tmux. Nothing anthropic can do about that. Gemini cli is horrible though.
- mccoyb 6mo ago
  Another way to think about it: For Anthropic to have the best version of this software, they'd have to simultaneously ... well, have the best version of the software, but also beat every other AI company at all subtasks (like: technical writing, diagramming, bug finding -- they'd need to have the unequivocal "best model" in all categories). Surely their version is not going to allow you to e.g. invoke Codex or what have you as part of their stack.
fede_dp 6mo ago
[dead]
yalogin 6mo ago
This is actually really nice from anthropic. They are aggressively owning the entire development stack for every swe. They become the default development platform. Automatic recurring revenue too and I am sure they will come up with more categories of subscriptions too.
woah 6mo ago
Are they entering their OpenAI throw shit at the wall phase?
htrp 6mo ago
Reminder that Anthropic's goal is to sell you more tokens...
- xij 6mo ago
  Yes, exactly. That's why their harness has no incentive to help you save tokens. Just conflict of interest.
baq 6mo ago
I assume Mythos, if ever released to the wide public at all, will only be available in the Claude cloud harness. (Not counting special enterprise and government contracts naturally.)
- schappim 6mo ago
  Folks suspect Mythos is an unaligned Opus 4.7
  - 2001zhaozhao 6mo ago
    it's probably not, they are hiking the price to 5x for companies with access to it. (or 1.67x of Opus 4.1)
_pdp_ 6mo ago
I suspect this is effectively programatic access to the same infrastructure used by Claude Desktop when it needs to run jobs in the cloud on the Anthropic servers... with added configurability and observations. In other words, it is designed for companies to build on top of the Anthropic platform. Fo example, you are a SaaS and you want to build a way of running agents programatically for your customers, they basically offer a solution. It is not for personal use although you can certainly do so if you are prepared to pay the price for the API. The downside is obviously this is locked to Anthropic models. The other downsides is that the authentication story at the moment is underwhelming, hacking, and dare I say, insecure. I have a few reservations. We already have this platform and I am putting together and open-source example how to create your own version of this. Anthropic models are great but there are plenty of open-source models too and frankly agents do not need to run like claude code in order to be successful at whatever they need to do. The agent architecture entirely depends on the problem domain in my own experience.
johnwhitman 6mo ago
[dead]
Kim_Bruning 6mo ago
API tokens only. Does allow MCP, so you're not as tied as you might think. But mere mortals can't really run many sorts of agents on api tokens I don't think.
- azmz 6mo ago
  [flagged]
deleted 6mo ago
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guillaumerx 6mo ago
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guillaumerx 6mo ago
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thewhitelynx 6mo ago
What's the open source alternative?
- Tarcroi 6mo ago
  As I mentioned in another comment here, I've been working on an open-source alternative. Multi-model, 5 providers with fallback. Happy to share the repo if you're interested.
chepy 6mo ago
[dead]
suncemoje 6mo ago
I am wondering if this is (or what else will be) the last piece of software + infra that's needed to "automate it all" and have non-technical people build, run, and maintain it? To me the all this agentic workflow automation is headed that way. Am I missing something?
- johnphilipp 6mo ago
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- deleted 6mo ago
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jguetzkow 6mo ago
Interesting that the entire discussion here is about orchestration, vendor lock-in, and model selection — but nobody is asking about the output. These agents run for hours, write code across multiple repos, and open PRs autonomously. Anthropic built solid infrastructure governance: sandboxing, scoped permissions, execution tracing. That's the "can the agent access this system safely?" question, answered. But there's a different question that nobody seems to be answering: is the generated code actually correct? Not syntactically — it almost always is. I mean semantically. Does it reference database fields that actually exist in the schema? Does it call API routes that are actually defined? Does it handle env variables that are actually set? Does it meet compliance requirements that apply to the system it's modifying? 45% of AI-generated code contains security vulnerabilities (Veracode). Code duplication has quadrupled (GitClear). And we're now scaling this with autonomous agents that run unsupervised for hours. The orchestration problem is getting solved. The governance-of-output problem is wide open. That's the layer that's missing.
esteyang 6mo ago
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kratos007 6mo ago
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YaraDori 6mo ago
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digdatechAGI 6mo ago
[flagged]
digdatechAGI 6mo ago
[flagged]
- azmz 6mo ago
  [flagged]

169 points by adocomplete 6mo ago

MANAGED AGENTS sounds like progress, but also like we’re standardizing around the current limitations instead of solving them.

datadrivenangel 6mo ago

And now OpenClaw is dead because serious people have a less janky option!

lambdanodecore 6mo ago

The next $100B buisness model in 2026 is AaaS (Agent as a Service).

dennisy 6mo ago
Let’s just shorten it to AaS?
- woah 6mo ago
  agentic software services
- marknutter 6mo ago
  Agent Solution Services

bnchrch 6mo ago

Happy to see this launched, particularly today. I own a stake in a small brewery in Canada, and this feature just saved me setting up some infrastructure to "productionize" an agent we created to assist with ordering, invoicing, and government document creation. I get paid in beer and vibes for projects like these, so the more I can ship these projects in the same place I prototype them the better. (Also don't worry all, still have SF income to buy food for my family with)

SpaceManNabs 6mo ago
i get paid in vibes and chilling as well for some similar agent stuff i do for content creators. quick question, how do you manage these side projects that kinda need to be production ready but aren't you are actual SF job lol? some of these people think they are my actual customer/client but like i do it for fun and to help them out.
- emvideo 6mo ago
  As a video content creator, I'm curious if you would mind sharing the agentic stuff you're doing for others?
  - SpaceManNabs 6mo ago
    not necessarly agentic i use comfyui to generate cartoons for some comedians i also have an n8n pipeline (there is an agent here) that mines social media for certain topics and audio i also use gemini to transcribe audio from sets and to generate scripts i am working on a clipmaker because I find opus pro and others to leave out context and audience reactions too often.. i will just upscale in topaz anyways.
    - emvideo 5mo ago
      I've used Opus a few times and always found it lacking as well. I'd be interested in a clip maker that doesn't miss context.

ziml77 6mo ago

Those agents did such a wonderful job making and deploying this page that the testimonials are unreadable because each spot has two of them overlapping.

Revisional_Sin 6mo ago
I just have a black page.
adrian_b 6mo ago
That is also true for me with Firefox on Linux. However, Vivaldi on Linux renders it correctly, so I assume that it probably works right only in Chrome and completely compatible browsers. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of Web sites that work right in a single browser, usually Chrome, so I always must keep around at least 2 or 3 different browsers.

llmslave 6mo ago

This is going to grow into a sophisticated platform, and is what will eventually compete head on with saas. I dont think companies will build their own agents, aside from looping in tools. As the models improve, there will be less hand holding. This could end up competing with AWS/GCP

siva7 6mo ago
What exactly makes you think that AWS & co. don't have already two competing Agents-as-a-Service Platforms at any time?
- llmslave 6mo ago
  Anthropic is very far ahead on agentic engineering. There is more to getting it to work than it looks, and their models might be directly trained to know how to use the claude code harness. But beyond that, AWS is a very complex platform. Agents simplify saas, the agent itself manages the api calls, maybe the database queries, more of the logic. As software moves into the agent, you need less cloud capability, and a better agent harness/hosting. Essentially, this makes the AWS platform obsolete, most services make much less sense.
lurker919 6mo ago
Exactly my thoughts, AWS is due for a large rewrite/ground up rewrite from first principles to be able to fully utilize LLMs/agentic capabilities.
- llmslave 6mo ago
  yeah, alot of the services dont make as much sense
mrbungie 6mo ago
They need to offer more 9s of availability before this happens though.

JLO64 6mo ago

As someone who spins up docker containers where I use the Anthropic Agentic SDK to build Jekyll websites for customers, I don’t see much of an appeal. I didn’t find it that difficult to set up the infrastructure, the hard part was getting the agents to do exactly what I wanted. Besides, eventually I might want to transition away to another provider (or even self hosting) so I’d prefer having that freedom.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

codinhood 6mo ago

I wonder how long until Claude/OpenAI eat a lot of the current AI/Agent SaaS's lunch. Originally I thought they would stick towards being a model provider mainly, but with all the recent releases it seems they do want to provide more "services." Wonder what part of the market 3rd party apps will build a moat around?

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ergocoder 6mo ago
Probably never. There are a couple reasons: 1. We pay for saas, so we don't have to manage it. If you vibe-code or use these AI things, then you are managing it yourself. 2. Most Saas is like $20-$100/month/person for most Saas. For a software engineer, that maybe <1h of pay. 3. Most Saas require some sort of human in the loop to check for quality (at least sampling). No users would want to do that. Number 2 is the biggest reason. It's $20 a month.... I'm not gonna replace that with anything. Writing this message already costs more than $20 of my time. I predict that the market will get bigger because people are more prone to automate the long-tail/last-mile stuff since they are able to
- codinhood 6mo ago
  Interesting, so you're saying Anthropic/Openai/etc will get a general solution that won't be hands off. The moat for other companies will be creating the specific, managed solution. I can see that, assuming models don't make some giant leap forward.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - azmz 6mo ago
    [flagged]
- spiderfarmer 6mo ago
  Your vision on the market for this is skewed by the fact that you're probably overpaid.

aivillage_team 6mo ago

[dead]

cedws 6mo ago

I saw this coming. Anthropic wants to shift developers on to their platform where they’re in control. The fight for harness control has been terribly inconvenient for them. To score a big IPO they need to be a platform, not just a token pipeline. Everything they’re doing signals they’re moving in this direction.

spwa4 6mo ago
Well, that sucks. Replacing the harness with something task-specific has proven very powerful in my usecases. But you should correct: Claude is very happy to let you use whatever you want for a harness ... as long as you're on a pay-as-you-go plan. So it's not blocked. It's just not allowed on the $20 per month plan. First, harnesses can give access to company internal tools (like the ticket queue). You could do this with MCP, but it's much harder, slower and it kind of resists doing this (if you want a bot to solve a ticket, why not start with an entire overview of the ticket in the first request to your model? This can't easily be done with MCP) Second harnesses can direct the whole process. A trivial example is that you can improve performance in a very simple way: ask "are you sure?" showing the model what it intends to do, BEFORE doing it. Improves performance by 10%, right there. Give a model the chance to look at what it's doing and change it's mind before committing. Then ask a human the same question, with a nice yes/no button. Try that with MCP. Of course you quickly find a million places to change the process and then you can go and meta-change the process. Like asking an AI what steps should be followed first, then do those steps, most of whom are AI invocations with parts of the tickets (say examine the customer database, extract what's relevant to this problem, ...). Limiting context is very powerful, and not just because it gets you cheaper requests. Get an AI to make relevant context for a particular step before actually doing that step ...
- gck1 6mo ago
  > A trivial example is that you can improve performance in a very simple way: ask "are you sure?" showing the model what it intends to do, BEFORE doing it. Improves performance by 10% Put it into the "are you sure" loop and you'll see the model will just keep oscillating for eternity. If you ask the model to question the output, it will take it as an instruction that it must, even if the output is correct.

aoliveira 6mo ago

They keep calling this the first solution of this kind...obviously Anthropic is a much larger company, but https://smith.langchain.com/ https://smith.langchain.com/ has this...and had for a while, or am I missing something?

dangoodmanUT 6mo ago

This was inevitable, I called this a few weeks ago [1]. It’s an easy way to increase revenue without making the models smarter, and lock you in harder https://danthegoodman.substack.com/p/where-agents-converge https://danthegoodman.substack.com/p/where-agents-converge

0o_MrPatrick_o0 6mo ago

I’ve been building my own version of this. It’s a bit shocking to see parallel ideation. FWIW- IMO, being locked into a single model provider is a deal breaker. This solution will distract a lot of folks and doom-lock them into Anthropic. That’ll probably be fine for small offices, but it is suicidal to get hooked into Anthropic’s way of doing things for anything complex. IME, you want to be able to compare different models and you end up managing them to your style. It’s a bit like cooking- where you may have greater affinity for certain flavors. You make selection tradeoffs on when to use a frontier model on design & planning vs something self hosted for simpler operations tasks.

TIPSIO 6mo ago
FWIW everyone is also building a version of this themselves. Only so many directions to go
- rtuin 6mo ago
  Most definitely. Although I haven’t found an (F)OSS project that lets one easily ship [favorite harness SDK] to self-hosted platform yet. Which projects are standing out in this space right now?
  - jawiggins 6mo ago
    Shameless self promo but, I've been working on Optio specifically for coding, it works by taking any harness you want and tasking it to open Github/lab PRs based on notion/jira/linear tickets, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520220 It works on top of k8s, so you can deploy and run in your own compute cluster. Right now it's focused only on coding tasks but I'm currently working on abstractions so you can similarly orchestrate large runs of any agentic workflow.
    - Jayakumark 6mo ago
      @jawiggins saw your repo it looks like openAI symphony but better as it works across multiple agents and issue trackers and the feedback loop is great . One feature request though - can you add plan mode ? Your issues are so detailed it becomes plan to implement (but I guess your plan mode is currently happening outside of GitHub issues ) but let’s say issue is “implement support for plan mode” there should be back and forth with agent with issue tags pointing to opus max and/or plan mode - so we can correct agents plan back and forth and once tag is removed it can start implementing or something similar ?

siva7 6mo ago

> With Managed Agents, you define outcomes and success criteria, and Claude self-evaluates and iterates until it gets there (available in research preview, request access here). It also supports traditional prompt-and-response workflows when you want tighter control. Call me stupid, but this sounds not like they want software developers to be around in a year or two.

baal80spam 6mo ago
But that's exactly what Dario Amodei (Anthropic CEO) wants.

Sol- 6mo ago

In addition to the managed interface for agent configuration and so on, is the novelty that all the agents run on Anthropic's infra? Sort of like Claude Code on the Web? If so, interesting that they move up the stack, from just a provider of an intelligence API to more complex deployed products.

jameslk 6mo ago

We're in the early days of agentic frameworks, like the pre-PHP web. CGI scripts and webmasters. Eventually the state-of-the-art will slow down and we'll eventually have something elegant like Rails come out. Until then, every agent framework is completely reinvented every week due to new patterns and new models. evals, ReACT, DSPy, RLM, memory patterns, claws, dynamic context, sandbox strategies. It seems like locking in to a framework is a losing proposition for anyone trying to stay competitive. See also: LangChain trying to be the Next.js/Vercel of agents but everyone recommending building your own. That said, Anthropic pulls a lot of weight owning the models themselves and probably an easier-to-use solution will get some adoption from those who are better served by going from nothing to something agentic, despite lock-in and the constant churn of model tech

dmix 6mo ago
Completely agree re: AI chatbot/RAG being just like the pre-PHP web world. There's a hundred half baked solutions floating on blogs and github but not a coherent dominant framework that puts it all together properly. Langchain is close but still feels a bit abstract and DIY. That plus everyone is using 5 different vector DBs and reranking models from different vendors than the answer models etc.
gck1 6mo ago
I believe framework is simply never, ever going to work for LLM-based agentic workflows. Framework is simply way too rigid for a non-deterministic technology. We may see libraries that provide tools for managing agents, but then again, there's nothing that tmux can't do already.
- harlequinetcie 6mo ago
  I'm a bit at odds with this. I agree a framework is something that sounds outdated. I also believe an orchestrator is needed. Something that abstracts you from a specific provider. Like hardware, drivers and operating systems. Right now, my thoughts are on that line: Who will build that operating system? Who will have it in the cloud? It needs to be robust to operate for large organizations, open source, and sit on top of any provider. Right now we are seeing BSD vs GNU/Linux vs DOS kind of battles.

patrickkidger 6mo ago

I'm not sure if I'm about to be the old man yelling at clouds, but Anthropic seem to be 'AWS-ifying'. An increasing suite of products which (at least to me) seem to undifferentiated amongst themselves, and all drawn from the same roulette wheel of words. We've got Claude Managed Agents, Claude Agent SDK, Claude API, Claude Code, Claude Platform, Claude Cowork, Claude Enterprise, and plain old 'Claude'. And honourable mention to Claude Haiku/Sonnet/Opus 4.{whatever} as yet another thing with the same prefix. I feel like it's about once a week I see a new announcement here on HN about some new agentic Claude whatever-it-is. I have pretty much retreated in the face of this to 'just the API + `pi` + Claude Opus 4.{most recent minor release}', as a surface area I can understand.

esaym 6mo ago

The website is solid black on Firefox mobile for android. Maybe they should get an agent on that.

jorl17 6mo ago
Anthropic's website is always completely broken for me on Zen (a firefox derivative). I used to think it was an extension, but even without extensions it often just shows blank pages.
- raggi 6mo ago
  Same for me in firefox and chrome. I'm sure it's one of the DNS block lists I have and some really crappy marketing tracking code. Edit: confirmed, loads with a public DNS provider that has no blocklists.
ed_mercer 6mo ago
Works fine here, also on Firefox mobile (149.0.1) on Android 16.

tailsdog 6mo ago

Looks great, I can't wait to use it. I imagine it could become very expensive for certain workflows, it will probably be like AWS where if you're not careful with the setup and watching what you're doing it will spin up 1000s of agents and rack up huge bills! It's going to be a massive money spinner!

rick1290 6mo ago

Not quite sold on this. I'm going to stick with pydantic ai and dbos/temporal/celery. I do not want to be vendor locked into one of these players. I want to work with absoluately any llm I want... I think we need to keep pushing for best in class open source orchestrtion and not get sucked into this platforms.

mdrachuk 6mo ago

It’s all good until your production agents deployment has a single 9 uptime. I use Claude Code as my main coding harness daily but making customers reliant on Anthropic software is a big no-no. Quality engineering is just not their thing.

mccoyb 6mo ago

I'm suspicious that this is going to lead to optimal orchestration ... or rather, that open source won't produce a far better alternative in time. The best performance I've gotten is by mixing agents from different companies. Unless there is a "winner take all" agent (I seriously doubt it, based on the dynamics and cost of collecting high quality RL data), I think the best orchestration systems are going to involve mixing agents. Here, it's not about the planner, it's about the workers. Some agents are just better at certain things than others. For instance, Opus 4.6 on max does not hold a candle to GPT 5.4 xhigh in terms of bug finding. It's just not even a comparison, iykyk. Almost analogous to how diversity of thought can improve the robustness of the outcomes in real world teams. The same thing seems to be true in mixture-of-agent-distributions space.

intothemild 6mo ago
Yeah this has been my experience too, mixing agents/models from different companies.. Having Opus write a spec, then send to Gemini to revise, back to Opus to fix, then to me to read and approve.. Send to a local model like Qwen3.5 to build, then off to Opus to review ... This was such an amazing flow, until Anthropic decided to change their minds.
- lbreakjai 6mo ago
  This is still very much doable. This is exactly how I'm working. I'm using opencode with a mixture-of-agents I built (https://github.com/tessellate-digital/notion-agent-hive https://github.com/tessellate-digital/notion-agent-hive), where the model behind each agent is configurable.
- gck1 6mo ago
  You can still do all of this. With tmux. Nothing anthropic can do about that. Gemini cli is horrible though.
mccoyb 6mo ago
Another way to think about it: For Anthropic to have the best version of this software, they'd have to simultaneously ... well, have the best version of the software, but also beat every other AI company at all subtasks (like: technical writing, diagramming, bug finding -- they'd need to have the unequivocal "best model" in all categories). Surely their version is not going to allow you to e.g. invoke Codex or what have you as part of their stack.

fede_dp 6mo ago

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yalogin 6mo ago

This is actually really nice from anthropic. They are aggressively owning the entire development stack for every swe. They become the default development platform. Automatic recurring revenue too and I am sure they will come up with more categories of subscriptions too.

woah 6mo ago

Are they entering their OpenAI throw shit at the wall phase?

htrp 6mo ago

Reminder that Anthropic's goal is to sell you more tokens...

xij 6mo ago
Yes, exactly. That's why their harness has no incentive to help you save tokens. Just conflict of interest.

baq 6mo ago

I assume Mythos, if ever released to the wide public at all, will only be available in the Claude cloud harness. (Not counting special enterprise and government contracts naturally.)

schappim 6mo ago
Folks suspect Mythos is an unaligned Opus 4.7
- 2001zhaozhao 6mo ago
  it's probably not, they are hiking the price to 5x for companies with access to it. (or 1.67x of Opus 4.1)

_pdp_ 6mo ago

I suspect this is effectively programatic access to the same infrastructure used by Claude Desktop when it needs to run jobs in the cloud on the Anthropic servers... with added configurability and observations. In other words, it is designed for companies to build on top of the Anthropic platform. Fo example, you are a SaaS and you want to build a way of running agents programatically for your customers, they basically offer a solution. It is not for personal use although you can certainly do so if you are prepared to pay the price for the API. The downside is obviously this is locked to Anthropic models. The other downsides is that the authentication story at the moment is underwhelming, hacking, and dare I say, insecure. I have a few reservations. We already have this platform and I am putting together and open-source example how to create your own version of this. Anthropic models are great but there are plenty of open-source models too and frankly agents do not need to run like claude code in order to be successful at whatever they need to do. The agent architecture entirely depends on the problem domain in my own experience.

johnwhitman 6mo ago

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Kim_Bruning 6mo ago

API tokens only. Does allow MCP, so you're not as tied as you might think. But mere mortals can't really run many sorts of agents on api tokens I don't think.

azmz 6mo ago
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thewhitelynx 6mo ago

What's the open source alternative?

Tarcroi 6mo ago
As I mentioned in another comment here, I've been working on an open-source alternative. Multi-model, 5 providers with fallback. Happy to share the repo if you're interested.

chepy 6mo ago

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suncemoje 6mo ago

I am wondering if this is (or what else will be) the last piece of software + infra that's needed to "automate it all" and have non-technical people build, run, and maintain it? To me the all this agentic workflow automation is headed that way. Am I missing something?

johnphilipp 6mo ago
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jguetzkow 6mo ago

Interesting that the entire discussion here is about orchestration, vendor lock-in, and model selection — but nobody is asking about the output. These agents run for hours, write code across multiple repos, and open PRs autonomously. Anthropic built solid infrastructure governance: sandboxing, scoped permissions, execution tracing. That's the "can the agent access this system safely?" question, answered. But there's a different question that nobody seems to be answering: is the generated code actually correct? Not syntactically — it almost always is. I mean semantically. Does it reference database fields that actually exist in the schema? Does it call API routes that are actually defined? Does it handle env variables that are actually set? Does it meet compliance requirements that apply to the system it's modifying? 45% of AI-generated code contains security vulnerabilities (Veracode). Code duplication has quadrupled (GitClear). And we're now scaling this with autonomous agents that run unsupervised for hours. The orchestration problem is getting solved. The governance-of-output problem is wide open. That's the layer that's missing.

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